From the 2014 News Archive

New Grants Provide Health Care Law Resources for the Public

The Law & Health Care Program, fueled by the efforts of Law School Professor Kathleen Hoke, continues to provide new legal resources to the community through recent grants, clinical work and technical assistance to state and local legislatures.

The project will identify the similarities, differences, and omissions in state laws about these issues to evaluate the effectiveness of legal levers designed to prevent violence and protect victims. It should also lead to a more integrated response system. Network attorneys Cristina Meneses ’08 and Mathew Swinburne ’08 are supporting the project.

“These additional grant funds allow Network staff to look more deeply at persistent and emerging issues that affect the health of our communities,” said Hoke. “They also help us provide new insights to policymakers.”

“We want to identify best practices that can be adopted through policy changes in Maryland,” Hoke said. “The goal is to reduce harm to the community by focusing on youth and on compulsive gamblers.”

The Network for Public Health Law Eastern Region, which is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is a national network designed to provide answers to professionals grappling with complex public health challenges that may warrant legal and policy solutions. The University of Maryland Carey School of Law, working with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is one of five regional headquarters for the Network. The Eastern Region is comprised of Washington, D.C., Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. Each region has areas of particular expertise on which they will provide service nationwide; the Eastern Region’s specialty areas are injury prevention, environmental health and food safety.